Read Online Bristol House by Beverly Swerling - Free Book Online Page B

hermits come out of their little houses and take a walk.”
    “Now you are joking.”
    “I’m not. It’s true. They stroll along two by two and talk. Every fifteen minutes they change partners. The weekly walk was started by Saint Bruno when he founded the order in the eleventh century. Five thousand feet up a French mountain, incidentally, at La Grande Chartreuse. In the mouths of English speakers, Chartreuse became Charterhouse, so today that’s what their monasteries are all called.” Annie stood up. “More coffee?”
    “Yes, thanks.”
    She took his empty mug and started down the hall toward the kitchen. The radios were playing softly as she passed, murmuring in unison about the death of a prominent Roman Catholic cardinal in Holland who as a young man survived imprisonment by the Gestapo but at eighty-eight choked to death in a bizarre accident involving a quail egg. It occurred to Annie that she’d never seen a quail egg. Or a live quail, for that matter.
    It was after seven. She should probably offer to make something to eat. But not only did she have nothing so gourmet as quail, her shopping had not anticipated dinner for two. She had one pork chop and one chicken breast. Maybe he’d like a cheese sandwich.
    It was deep dusk outside—a bit early for such a blueberry sky. Perhaps a storm was coming. The kitchen was dim and full of shadows. Annie turned and reached for the light switch. The movement gave her a direct view down the short leg of the hall.
    Her heart accelerated until it was a drum thudding in her chest. “Geoff, come here.”
    Her voice sounded—even to her—far away, distant, and apparently not loud enough. She tried again. “Geoff, I’m in the kitchen. Come. Right now, please.”
    She heard him running down the hall in the semidarkness.
    “Look.” Annie pointed to an intense bright light shining from under the closed door of the back bedroom.
    Dom Justin
    From the Waiting Place
    We walked and talked as if that May afternoon in the year of Our Lord 1535 were an ordinary Thursday. Instead it was the day the man we Carthusians call the Venerable Father, our prior, had been most cruelly martyred and went to paradise. Also the day when the funnel of wind had come down and pulverized the cobbles outside our monastery church. Looking back, I have no doubt many thought that remarkable phenomenon a sign of heaven’s displeasure with the actions of the king, but even among ourselves such was our caution in those times that no one gave voice to the idea.
    Dom Casper, however, could not hold back his tears when he spoke of the martyrdom of the Venerable Father, but the others—and I myself, who had certainly the least right to do so—talked more of the glory than the suffering. Dom Hilary, who always knew more than the rest (as if God himself spoke to Hilary on account of his superior virtue) told what he’d heard from Fra Herman, one of the brothers of our order who got about the countryside, unlike us monks who are vowed to almost total silence and solitude.
    Dom Hilary said that, according to Herman, immediately the deed was done, a woman of the town ran straight to the house of the lay brothers and told them she’d been near enough to hear the Venerable Father’s last words. It was after he had been hanged and cut down, and after his belly was slit and his entrails pulled out, and while the knife was poised to enter his chest. According to this woman, he said, “Good Jesu, what will ye do with my heart?” Then, so the woman said, his heart was cut apart from him, and he gave up his spirit.
    Dom Augustine, who was always a bit simple as well as contrary, said it was an odd thing to say. But I pointed out it was a mark of the Venerable Father’s certainty that his heart was going to Our Blessed Lord, since he had offered it so many years ago when first he entered the Charterhouse.
    It was astonishing how easy it was for an imposter like myself to sound like a pious Carthusian. Meanwhile,